Quelques soucis…et le Grand Paradis*

It’s been awhile since I posted on this blog – frankly we’ve had a few soucis (worries) with all that has been happening with the fires in California.  The Sonoma county Walbridge fire came within 15 miles our house in Sebastopol, so we were anxiously watching the fire, wind and evacuation maps from here in Switzerland.  Luckily, the fire is now mostly contained, but many people lost their homes and it’s really devastating watching what is happening with fires and air quality in the Bay area and the western U.S. right now.

 

We’ve also been preoccupied with getting through the myriad of paperwork required from to be able to live this year in Canton Vaud in Switzerland.  It was just as hard to get our residence card here as it was to get our Swiss visa (which came 4 days before we left the U.S.), and it turns out that you can’t get a cell phone or bank account without a residence card.  Friday’s trip to the bank to open our bank account with our new cartes d’identité was just one of many hoops that we will need to go through to open an account.  Someday we will have one, but first they have to make sure that we can’t stash any ill-gotten gains into our new Swiss bank account.

Another souci - we had a quick brush with the law on one of our bike rides when I didn’t see a red light while making a right turn, and Doug was waiting on the sidewalk for me to come up the hill.  We are now law-abiding Swiss citizens, and have stopped our bad habit of ignoring red lights before we turn and riding on the sidewalks.  We are still enjoying our breath-taking bike rides along the lake and on the plateau above Lausanne, this one to the town of Vevey along the lake.

Stopping mid-bike ride in Vevey for coffee

I was trapped in this WC (bathroom) in Vevey for 20 minutes

due to a lock mal-function (another souci)

Last weekend we had an amazing two days of hiking in the Alps bordering France, staying in Champéry, one of Switzerland’s oldest ski resort areas.  The ski area is part of a group of French and Swiss ski stations called Porte de Soleil.  The town is at the base of a mountain range called the Dents du Midi, seven jagged tooth-like peaks that you can see from miles away, even on the plateau above Lausanne where we ride.  We had two days of incredible hiking with spectacular views.

 

View of the Dents du Midi 

from the train

View of Dents du Midi from Champéry

Downtown Champéry

View from our balcony

Lunch stop at Refuge de Bonveau

The second day we took a gondola up to start the hike, walked high in the mountains and then climbed up to Col de Cou, where we briefly stepped into France, and then hiked with the cows along a ridge walk back to the valley floor through Grand Paradis back to Champéry.  And grand paradis it is…we are so grateful to be here.

Doug with Dent du Midi in the background

Col de Cou

Ridge walk back from Col de Cou - 360 views

* This pithy title (Quelques soucis... et le Grand Paridis) rhymes in French

On ne vous raconte pas de salades*

We spend so much time thinking about, shopping for and preparing our food here that I thought I’d dedicate a blog to food.  Anyone that knows me well knows that I eat a ridiculous amount of vegetables, so trying to keep our little refrigerator full of veggies is almost a full time job. Luckily we have two market days per week in Lausanne, and the Lausanne market is AMAZING!   The marché starts at Place St. François, and the vendors are lined up and down the steep, narrow, cobblestone pedestrian only streets all the way up to Place Rippone. 

While Wednesday’s market is serious business, the Saturday market is like a fête!**  Even more vendors and people, musicians on the street corners, tourists stopping at the Place Palud to see the animated clock tell the history of Canton Vaud.  We stopped for coffee in the square today, and saw a little boy running past us toward the clock - ah, yes, it must be the top of the hour!

The Palud clock is on the building behind Doug

Giant Swiss flag covering the Place Palud

The apples are starting to arrive in the market, and we were surprised to see Gravensteins.  We have 7 Gravenstein apple trees at our house in Sebastopol so we're extra fond of that variety.  It turns out that Gravensteins have been around since the 17th century, most likely coming from Germany or Italy.  Our Sebastopol apple crop was early and light this year, so after picking three bushels of our apples, our son Scott and his friend Cody found a local farmer who sold them 200 pounds of drops for $60. They're making hard cider which is now bubbling away in Cody's garage in San Francisco. 

 

Some of our bounty!

When we ride out of town on our bike rides, we see so many well tended and fertilized fields around Canton Vaud (with lots of cows around for that ‘a la nature’ fertilizer).  We regularly pass by a farm that has a self-service stand, and this week we stopped to see one with beautifully arranged fruits and veggies. We were excited to see that same vender, “la famille Hess,” at the Wed/Sat marché at La Place Palud!  So we stopped by at today’s market and had a nice chat with them, after buying some of their veggies, of course.

Another food local food novelty we’ve found (again at a self-service stand) is pataclettes (https://www.pataclette.ch/), a cross between potato skins and raclette, advertised as the first fondue or raclette you can eat with 2 fingers.  For those of you who might not know,  raclette is  is a semi-soft cow’s milk cheese but is also a Swiss dish (also popular in the French Alpes) that involves a machine with individual paddles that are put under a heating element to melt the slices of cheese.  You scrape off the cheese over new potatoes, pickled onions or cornichons.  As soon as the weather turns cold, the Swiss start craving this delicious dish, and so will we!

• * On ne vous raconte pas de salades = We’re not making this up

• **Fête = party

Mixing it up

We’ve been taking advantage of the nice weather to get out on our bikes, but have also been mixing it up with some beautiful local hikes and swimming.

 

We went on a few more overnight bike rides, riding in the early morning from our apartment to hop on the train with our bikes and backpacks.  One trip was with friends to Sursee, west of Lucerne, riding both around the hills and the Zugersee lake. 

Another trip from our apartment was around Lake Geneva - it looked like it's an easy, flat day ride, but after 112 miles in the heat, we were pretty tired chugging back up the hill to  Mont-Repos!

View of Lausanne from across the lake in Evian

 

Lac Léman in Geneva

We took another trip to Petite Cortaillod in the Neuchatel area, this time just the two of us. There we had two rides - one straight up out of town in 90+ degree heat (involving some bike carrying on an overgrown path obviously meant for mountain bikes or wild animals), and another to Bienne around the Lake Bielersee. 

Bielersee Lake

Riding through the vineyards along the Bielersee

Bielersee Lake

Petite Cortaillod pier

August 1 - National Swiss Day

You have to make a bike reservation on some of the regional trains, and we were so proud of ourselves for making the reservation on our phone and finding the bike spot on the way out.  On the way back we ended up on the wrong car, and had to make a dash for it back to the correct car, me flying along the station in my flip-flops, barely making it back on the train. 

 

Giving our necks and biking muscles a break, we’ve gone on some gorgeous hikes as well.  One of our favorites is to take the #9 bus from our apartment to the end of the line at Lutry/Corniche, get off, and start the nearby trail through the Lavaux vineyards.  When you hike you have more time to stop and take photos and appreciate the stunning views.  Our first hike happened to coincide with a vineyard spraying day, so we put on our Covid masks and zig-zagged along avoiding the low flying helicopters and the masked men on the ground with spraying canisters.  The rest of the hike was spectacular and we walked to the train station in Riez and waited on the beach by the lake for our train to take us back home.

Views from Lavaux

 

Lac Léman

Meeting Marie-Anne along the trail at Alan Chollet's wine stand

  

 Grandvaux

Another fun hike in Lausanne is to follow “les pas des renards” on the Le Chemin de la Vauchère trail, which starts high above Lausanne and follows a stream all the way down to Lac Léman.  You can download the trail, and also follow the signs and fox footprints on the sidewalks that mark the trail along the way

I made a list of 20 things to do in 2020, and I was humming along the beginning of the year, ahead of schedule with my list until COVID-19 came along and half of the things on my list became impossible due to the shutdowns in the SF Bay area.  But anticipating our stay in Switzerland, one thing on my list was to swim in Lac Léman (Lake Geneva).  So on one of our 90 degrees days I decided I had to give it a try – we walked down to the lake, and success… just a little cold at first but wonderful!  After that, I added swimming in Lake Neuchatel and Lake Bielersee to my list!

20 things to do in 2020 - one more check

Lost in Lausanne : Cycling, Cows, Cheese, Chocolate and Covid - Part II

After 3 flights and 24 hours of travel, we finally made it to Lausanne, Switzerland, where we will be living for the next year.  The world has changed in unimaginable ways since we lived here 8 years ago, when we documented our lives in this Lost in Lausanne blog.  Back then the tagline was “Cycling, cows, cheese and chocolate” to which we should add “Covid.” Our experience during this pandemic will be quite different than the idyllic year we had back in 2012.

                                                 

The San Francisco airport was uncharacteristically quiet, and you could almost sense the fear in everyone’s eyes for even contemplating flying right now.  Two people ahead of us in line were turned away from their flights because of the new European travel ban that had come into effect the day before.  We were expecting to have only a handful of people on our flights, but they were all surprisingly full.  For the past 4 months we’ve been pretty isolated in San Francisco, so it was a shock to be around so many people.  We wore masks on the plane, and in the airports, taking them off only occasionally to eat.  I even drank with a straw tucked under my mask.  We’ve been here 2 weeks now, so we feel lucky to have avoided Covid-19 during our travels.

Being in Lausanne is like being in another world after coming from San Francisco, where masks are ubiquitous both on the streets and in the stores.  We rarely see people wearing masks here, although a week ago, Canton Vaud started requiring masks in all stores due to a small uptick in cases.  I got my haircut for the first time in 4 months, and with both my hairdresser and I wearing masks, I was happy to discover that I can still communicate in French through my mask.  We talked about the pandemic, and the possibility of a “2eme vague,” or second wave, which my hairdresser seems to think is inevitable, even in Switzerland.

Nearby Mon-Repos park

This view of Lac Léman and the Alpes never gets old

Lavaux vineyards

Doug and I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to be able to be in this beautiful country this next year, but also worry about our sons and family that we’ve left back home.  We love our new apartment in the Mon-Repos neighborhood, in a 1900s building with parquet floors that creak, high ceilings and tall old-fashioned windows.  Our favorite part of the apartment is the small terrace that faces a courtyard of other 1900s style buildings with their wrought iron balconies and shuttered windows.  I’ve made friends with the crows who come around to see what we’re doing on the terrace, or when we add some new flower pots and herbs – they are nosy and clever birds, pretending that they aren’t really watching us when while we eat.

Lake Thun near Interlaken

View across Lake Thun

We’ve arrived to mostly glorious, sunny summer weather, which from living here before we know will only last a few more months, so we’re trying to take advantage of it and get out on our bikes.  It’s been fun to rediscover our old routes, and start our rides from a new part of town.  Our first cycling foray out was to the Lavaux vineyards west of Lausanne, with breathtaking views of Lake Léman and the Alps across the lake.  We just got back from a two-day bike trip to Interlaken, riding along the Thun lake with my old friend Debbie and her husband Jean-Francois.  We are pinching ourselves that we are able to be here.